Is It Normal to Cry During Qigong?

Is it normal to cry during qigong? Yes. That is the short answer. The fuller answer is more useful: crying during qigong is neither a good sign nor a bad one, and once you see why, you can stop keeping score on yourself every time it happens — or every time it doesn’t.

If you want the mechanism behind the tears, read why you cry during qigong in the first place. This article is about what the tears mean, if anything, and — just as often — what it means when they never show up at all.

Is it normal to cry during qigong? Tears never had one meaning

You have seen somebody cry at a wedding. You have watched a mother cry when her child walked across a stage to graduate. Nobody in either room was sad. Tears do not carry one fixed meaning, and they never have. So the question “is this good or bad” is already the wrong question to be asking about your own practice.

What actually decides whether you cry has more to do with where your own qi happens to be sitting still, and everybody is sitting still in a different place. Picture two people at exactly the same level in their practice. One of them has a great deal built up around the lung, and cries in nearly every session. The other has practiced for ten years and has never cried once. Neither of them is ahead of the other. They are simply blocked in different rooms.

The child who cries hard and moves on

Watch a small child cry — really cry, the whole-body kind — and then watch what happens four minutes later. He is playing again, often with the very same child he was crying about a minute earlier. Nothing got stored. The feeling arrived, moved all the way through him, and was gone.

Now compare that with a grown man who is still angry about something that happened twenty years ago. It is the same basic feeling, in principle. One person let it move through completely. The other kept it. That difference — moving through versus holding on — is the entire question worth asking about your own crying, far more than whether it happened at all.

Why the comparison trap is so easy to fall into

Group classes make this worse, not better. You are standing in a room with fifteen other people, eyes closed, and you can hear that the person next to you is crying and you are not — or the reverse. It is tempting to read that as a scoreboard: they are more open, or more blocked, or further along than you, or you are more advanced because nothing moved for you today. None of those readings hold up.

Qi sits differently in every single person, shaped by years of a completely different life — different stress, different old injuries, different habits of holding the breath or the shoulders. Two people doing the identical form at the identical moment are moving qi through bodies that have nothing else in common. Comparing what surfaces for you against what surfaces for somebody else tells you almost nothing about either of you.

So what should you actually watch for?

Not whether you cried. Watch whether the feeling passed through and finished, or whether you are still carrying a version of it hours later. A practice where the tears come and go, and you finish the session and go about your day steady, is doing exactly what it should. If instead you consistently feel drained, flat, or unsettled for hours afterward, that is worth paying attention to — and it is a different question from whether crying itself is normal. (If that’s you, this piece on whether to let it all the way out is the next one to read.)

It is also worth asking, gently, whether what you are carrying is really something that shows up only in your practice, or whether it is present in your life more broadly and simply surfaces there too. Qigong is not a diagnostic tool and this is not medical guidance — it is a description of how qi and feeling relate to each other. If a pattern feels bigger than that description, a teacher who can watch you practice in person is the right next step, not a search engine.

What “letting it move through” actually looks like

It is not dramatic, and it does not require any particular technique beyond staying present. When tears come, the practice that lets them move through looks almost boring from the outside: the movement continues, the breathing stays even, the eyes may be wet or may not, and a few minutes later the wave has passed and the form continues as it was. There is no performance to it, no need to intensify the feeling or suppress it. Held qi and moving qi look completely different from the inside, even when they look identical from across the room.

You do not need anyone’s permission to cry in your own practice, and you do not need to perform composure either. You verify all of this in yourself, session by session, over weeks rather than any single afternoon. The Onenergy App carries a guided daily practice, plus a live group field on Saturday mornings, so you are never doing this work entirely alone. Start with the free Onenergy App and see for yourself what a normal week of practice actually looks like.

Related reading

• Why Do I Cry During Qigong?
• Why Do I Feel Empty and Flat After Crying?
• Can Emotions Really Be Stored in the Body?
• What Is Qigong? The Complete Guide